As a family medical practice, you have to work more intently to secure your bottom line and protect it while you treat your patients. Family practice billing can be difficult, but it can be easily improved.
For hospital-owned practices, this just means staying compliant with company policy, but for you, family practice billing is much more delicate. Many providers face the same difficulties throughout their billing process and must look for solutions that help them adapt and survive.
Common Difficulties for Family Practice Billing:
1) Low Staff Efficiency
Sometimes, even when you and your staff are putting forth their maximum effort, you can still fall behind. Depending on the size of your patient-base, your staff can often fall so far behind that it feels impossible to catch up. Your billing hinges largely on getting claims submitted and paid in a timely fashion. If your staff loses efficiency in this area, your practice will lose important payments. This is a common struggle for many family practices.
2) Lack of Timely Payments
Just mentioned, timely payments can make or break your practice. Billing depends on payments from insurance companies, but as a large portion of medical expenses increasingly become the patient’s responsibility, family practice providers may find their timely payments decreasing. For this reason, providers need to look for new ways to improve patient payments to really make a difference in their billing.
3) Lack of Usable Billing Tools
Providers who understand the importance of increasing patient payments and improving staff productivity still often lack the tools to do so. Whether it seems like an impossible transition, or they do not know where to start, family practice providers are hesitant to adopt some of the most-used tools. To truly impact your family practice billing, you need to use the right tools.
Ways to Improve your Medical Billing:
1) Detailed Collections Procedure
Your practice must have a detailed process for how to handle late patient payments. Having a structured approach in place will better help you manage your billing and improve the number of payments you receive. This includes teaching your staff on how to educate your patients about their medical bill, explaining their options, and knowing what to do with difficult collections.
2) Outsource Difficult Collections
Many family practice billing professionals are hesitant to outsource any aspect of their practice. The truth is that outsourcing difficult collections to a billing expert will increase the likelihood that your practice will receive payments on those seemingly-impossible medical bills. The right vendor will offer compassion and solutions to your patients without sacrificing the resources at your family practice.
3) Increase Clean Claims
Increasing your clean claims rate is essential to securing more on-time practice and improving your family practice billing. How is this done? You need to implement quality medical billing software that offers claim-approval tools that make a difference. One of the tools is claims scrubbing, which helps you identify any possible errors in your claim. This increases the likelihood that you will be approved. Other tools include specialty-specific software and the ability to identify the best time to submit your claim.
4) Never Stop Trying to Improve
Providers can make the mistake of thinking they have perfected their family practice billing, never trying to improve again. Your billing software should help you track your performance and identify your most common billing mistakes. This will not only help you see where problems are happening, but it helps you know what areas to improve. This will help you to continue growing and improving your family practice billing and achieve goals that were once impossible.
To learn more about a family practice billing solution that can help you tackle those pain points, click here.
